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The co-op structure is less used in the US, but there are quite a lot of significant employee owned corporations (which come with the limited liability benefits
by Quarrel 2y ago
The co-op structure is less used in the US, but there are quite a lot of significant employee owned corporations (which come with the limited liability benefits to shareholders).
There are also quite a few with mixed founder / employee ownership. Publix for instance employ 250,000 people across their supermarkets and are employee / founder owned.
A recent list of the largest from Oct 2023:
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100 https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
- xhkkffbf 2y agoWould it be fair to say that companies like AMZN or GOOG have "employee ownership" because of the stock options? If so, it means many tech companies meet this definition.
- dmoy 2y agoThe percentage of ownership is relevant, as is where the profit goes.
- Ericson2314 2y agoBoard control is probably more important than profit on this one, I'd say
- dmoy 2y agoRight, percentage of ownership (since board control stems from that?)
- stonogo 2y agoNot really, but technically yes. "Employee-owned" is being used in a specific way here; it's a specific form of ownership governance. Most often the shares are owned by employees via a trust, which the business funds. None (or mostly none!) of the stock options available to Amazon or Google staff are useful in terms of controlling the business. When someone is using the term "employee-owned business," they are generally referring to a business in which employees have actual control, not just a profit-sharing certificate. Of course, any publicly-traded company can be 'employee-owned' to whatever degree the employees buy shares. But this term usually indicates something else.
- semanticist 2y agoMost people working for Amazon don't get stock options, most of Amazon's employees are doing stock management in warehouses, delivery, etc. Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_ to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control over the company.
- Anon1096 2y agoIn many tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix, there is only 1 stock class and SWE employees get stock grants that aren't restricted on vest. You just conveniently picked the FAANG company where most of its workforce are warehouse employees.
- dbingham 2y agoBut the employees don't own a controlling share. For it to be a worker cooperative it really needs to be entirely owned and governed by the people working there.
- jandrewrogers 2y agoThe tradeoff is that requiring all shares be worker-owned devalues the shares owned by workers, due to massively reduced liquidity. This situation does not necessarily benefit the workers since they have an interest in maximizing the value of their share.
- bboygravity 2y agoHow does reduced liquidity equal lower share value? Makes no sense to me. Case in point example: SpaceX shares are very illiquid but also very very much up since SpaceX was founded.
- sokoloff 2y agoSuppose I own 0.01% of the company I work at. If that company is publicly traded, I can sell those shares to anyone. If that company is a co-op in which only employees are allowed to own shares, the only people I can sell my shares to are other employees. In general, more willing buyers (who in turn know they can they sell those shares unrestricted in the future to any buyer), increases the people willing to bid on those shares at any given moment in time. (It’s the same basic reason that you’d rather have $100 in cash than $100 gift card for Starbucks.)
- burkaman 2y agoNo it wouldn't, see here for example: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-google-shareholders-goog.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g.... All Google employees combined own probably less than 1% of the company. They would need to own at least 50% to accurately call it employee-owned.
- dv_dt 2y agoThere are a lot of different co-op structures and different aspects of the broad term co-op. Employee ownership is one aspect that could be further broken down. Profit participation, worker-led governance and decision making, formal legal & tax categorizations are other interesting aspects. Stock options in small percentages are a form of profit participation but a weak contributor to the question on if a business is a co-op.
- btbuildem 2y agoIt's not even in the same game, forget ballpark. Rank and file aren't really "shareholders". We hold an utterly insignificant stake compared to funds and other corps. They can take a board of directors and bend their beaks all they way back to their rectums, force them to act against a company's best interests. Employee ownership means the employees decide what they do with the profits derived from their labour. The company itself tends to benefit as well, in terms of stability, quality of work life, and long-term profitability.
- mattbrewsbytes 2y agoEmployee ownership can't exist if its a publicly traded company. The co-op model is literal ownership of direction of the company, not just financial ownership. Most publicly traded companies aren't anywhere close to employee owned even though they may grant stock to employees. Those employees have no say on the company direction (see latest news about Google firing employees for protesting).
- eatonphil 2y agoCo-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in agriculture.
- nextos 2y agoGalois.com, pretty famous in the software correctness area, is kinda a co-op right, as it is employee owned?
- nyssos 2y agoNot exactly. Galois employees are beneficiaries of the ESOP trust that owns the shares, rather than direct owners as in a prototypical cooperative.
- nextos 2y agoSure, my understanding was that Galois is not exactly a co-op. Why this structure? Is it more advantageous in the US?
- s1artibartfast 2y agoOne of the main challenges for co-ops is navigating the entry and exit. If you had Direct employee ownership, you have to buy in when you start and sell your stock back when you leave. A trust with the employees as beneficiaries solves a lot of these problems. It also prevents the co-op members from taking the company public for a huge payday.
- HideousKojima 2y agoI'm pretty sure that's more or less the same structure used by WinCo as opposed to direct ownership
- _mlbt 2y agoEnergy cooperatives are another thing I've seen work well here in the US. A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even received a few checks from them after moving out of the area and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great customer service too. They were significantly better in every way than the regional monopolies and municipal power companies I've dealt with. [1] https://www.touchstoneenergy.com https://www.touchstoneenergy.com
- dannyobrien 2y agoAlso worth noting for HN: Igalia is a workers' co-operative of open source developers, many of whom are significant contributors to browser and HTML renderer code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
- marricks 2y agoI was shopping at winco a couple years back, which is employee owned, and one of the cashiers was in his 40s/50s and mentioned he had a couple million in retirement. Very cool to hear, dude will likely be better off than me. Employee owned corporations are good.
- astrange 2y agoUnclear why hearing that someone else is richer than you is supposed to be cool, regardless of if they're capitalist coded or cashier coded.
- anthonymartinez 2y agoi dunno why you wouldn't want to celebrate the success of others, especially when they're essential workers!
- astrange 2y agoI don't think this situation is the same thing as celebrating the success of others! Of course in my neck of the woods (Silicon Valley) it's expected that all 50 year olds are multi millionaires, as all you need for that is have owned a house for a few decades.
- anigbrowl 2y agoBecause it suggests non-capitalist business models can be more successful than generally imagined.
- astrange 2y agoI think this is already well known due to the existence of landlords, who are pre-capitalist. Although most people don't think of farmers or California retirees as belonging to this class, which they probably should.
- getwiththeprog 2y agoCo-ops are a capitalist business model.
- vundercind 2y agoI’ve worked for an employee-owned US business. It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for everything were LOL WTF long. Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if it were a traditional ownership structure with a union rather than employee-owned. They did love to put that up front when selling a job there, though. As if it actually meant something.
- bobthepanda 2y agobig ships are generally terrible places, as a rule. places that are less bad are exceptions. but most of the time you're picking your poison, yet that doesn't mean alternative models aren't worth exploring.
- dbingham 2y agoWhich one? As with all things, there is a lot of variation. There will always be good places and bad. The question is whether they are better on average.
- rakoo 2y agoAs an employee-owned business, you had a say in this. How did the discussion go ? What were the arguments for and against those decisions ?
- vundercind 2y agoThis is not necessarily true depending on how the business is structured. Employee ownership doesn’t necessarily come with any actual control.
- rakoo 2y agoIn that case I question the use of "employee-owned". It might be technically true, but if it comes with no actual control there is no point in using that term. The original point is about companies where workers have actual control. That's what's important, that's what's interesting.